The Sword and Laser discussion

Usually we read books that align with our beliefs but are there any books that changed your mind on an issue? I used to think Robots should not be in charge of the government but then I read Scythe and the more and more I think about it I think robots/ AK would do a much better job running the world government than humans. I think the main reason we see so many stories of robots turning evil when they gain control is because of human hubris that humans are less corrupt able than machines I think the exact opposite is true

The Probability Broach introduced me to Libertarianism and made me much more open to it. Not sure if that would have happened anyway tho.

Further to your point, Neal Asher makes a good point for AI governance. Not sure I agree and at least one AI gets executed for being a bad influence.

Not recently ...
But some helped form my opinions, when I was younger. I would offer large chunks of Heinlein as examples - you don't have to agree with him (probably better if you don't), but he makes you think!

And there are some that raise your awareness of propaganda - and therefore make you less susceptible to it - e.g. C S Lewis 'Malacandra' trilogy and Zenna Henderson's 'People'.

More recently ... Try Mary Doria Russel "Sparrow" (and sequel).

I've read many books that helped me form opinions or ask new questions, but I think the only book that changed my mind about something was Isaac Asimov's The Gods Themselves, which changed my mind about David Hume's philosophy on God.

Hume argued that if God exists at all, it's likely some immoral beast, and at least not a well-meaning fellow. I was more of the opinion that God either existed or it didn't, but if it did, it probably wanted the universe to be a good place. I didn't really get this idea of a stupid or indifferent god, and I thought Hume was just trying to irritate religious philosophers.
In Asimov's book, he imagines hungry horny aliens in a parallel universe looking for energy for food and sex. Not very intelligent or moral, (view spoiler)[they manage to stumble upon a method to extract energy from other universes. It turns out that by doing that, they were making other universes more stable and capable of sustaining intelligent life (hide spoiler)], essentially making them Hume-like creepy gods.
That's not to say that I now believe that God is a hungry horny alien, only that I never considered that a multiverse theory of the universe could mean that universes are being created or modified by activities in another universe, and our existence could be attributed to something like the waste product of another universe.

There's lots of stuff like this out now, such as the idea that we're all in a simulation that some random kid made, but this was my first exposure to it, and it really did make me appreciate Hume's philosophy more.

No

Not a novel, but non-fiction books have. I don't want to get into sensitive subjects here, so it will remain a mystery.

I've gone on before about how certain books shaped my philosophies and interests but I don't know if I've ever mentioned A Brief History of Time. It was the final nail in the coffin of my Catholicism because of a section where Hawking shows that maybe the universe could have started without a god to give it a push.

Have a friend who had to read Faulkner's As I Lay Dying for a class, and it changed his mind on the abortion issue. As for me, I get epiphanies all the time when I read books - that's a form of changing one's mind, isn't it?

This is a great inquiry, and it really stretched my brain to think about it. One title that came to mind was the latest Neil Stephenson book called Termination Shock. I’m not so sure it changed my mind about Geo engineering completely, but it certainly opened up a new avenue of thinking, and perhaps caused me to reconsider that option to address climate change. Of course it(geo-engineering) still scares the shit out of me but we may be in a desperate crisis.

T.T. wrote: "Have a friend who had to read Faulkner's As I Lay Dying for a class, and it changed his mind on the abortion issue. As for me, I get epiphanies all the time when I read books - that's a form of cha..."

Also read in High School. I think about this scene a lot given recent events

Lots of books have opened my mind to various ideologies. Some of them became integral to my view of the world for years until something in the real world or another book dislodged the idea.

The most concrete examples that come to mind right now involve Neal Stephenson books. Snow Crash introduced me to the extreme end-game of libertarianism. (If you haven't read it before, you should! Although some of the tech has been surpassed by our world, it's (in a way) the seed behind all this recent talk of a Metaverse.) In the novel everything has become a franchise, including jails and policing.

Snow Crash is cyberpunk and his follow-up, The Diamond Age, starts off with a cyberpunk character being tried and killed in the first chapter. It's widely accepted as Stephenson saying the cyberpunk era is over. In The Diamond Age, Stephenson has gone from the burbclaves of Snow Crash to an idea that I kind of really want ot happen for real - instead of countries being made up of contiguous borders, they exist everywhere. Imagine if every city was made up of a bunch of Embassies - sovereign soil. So if you belong to the Hong Kong "country" you might find chunks of it in what is currently the US or Europe or Asia. And in that land, the Hong Kong laws and jurisdictions apply. Why do I want it to happen? Well, you know how there's periodic talk of Republican and Democratic States in the USA splitting off into 2 different countries? What happens to the Democratic Enclaves? (Eg Austin, Tx) Or the Republicans in California? Instead of everyone having to move to wherever, they could just have Red America and Blue America as little countries dotting the former USA. Of course, even as I write this I know that the biggest problem (apart from how we get there in the first place) is that of resource extraction. We'd need to be (as in The Diamond Age) in a world where scarcity is gone. Otherwise, there'd be too much fighting over which "countries" have the raw materials for the goods the other "countries" need. This is at least one reason why Kurdistan hasn't been allowed to leave Iraq (they have most of oil there)

Not to get too political but the current issues in the US are as much about control as they are about resources. I don't think people would be satisfied with the idea that you could pop over the border of the nearby town for an abortion or quick spot of THC.

While I liked Snow Crash it did fit into my category of "I get the point but its not a realistic scenario." I have a similar reaction to a lot of the YA novels like Hunger Games and Divergent.

yeah, good points, oaken. I meant resources are more of an issue for the sustainability of the system, but you're right. and of course it makes sense. look at Soviet Russia. people had to escape, they weren't allowed to immigrate, so there could definitely be a control mechanism, if nothing else to prevent brain drain. To bring it back to books, that was definitely a theme in Handmaid's Tale. Because of course all or most of the 1st Gen handmaids (who had known the previous world) would have preferred to emigrate than remain in that situation. (Assuming the rest of the world wasn't in the same boat - which, at least in the first book we don't know about)

Good question, but a tough one. I can think of plenty of books that helped form my mindset, but not many that actually changed a set stance. The closest I can come up with is The Salmon of Doubt, which convinced me to start calling myself an atheist instead of agnostic. (Not quite a novel, though.)

For me, it was "Lucifer's Hammer," when Senator Jellison, responding to pushback on his declaring death for a thief, "Society can only have the values it can afford." That goes a long way to explaining the Hebrews scriptures death sentences when Israel was a nomadic nation, and cities of refuge when they began to settle.